Results

As bustastrophes and motorway crashes continue, and public transport officials tell people “don’t use *our network* if you need to be somewhere on time”, Let’s Get Wellington looms like an approaching space-ship. What’s up and what’s going to happen?

On Friday the Transport Minister announced the 2018-21 funding from the National Land Transport Fund. It’s a big deal because it’s the tax money that funds how we get around. The press release is the usual stuff, but here’s what they say Wellington’s going to get…

Today the coalition government released its 10-year Government Policy Statement on Transport, showing how our taxes will be spent on getting around (and quite a lot of our rates too). It’s got some changes from the initial one, which saw much handwaving and consternation, but it’s a strong new direction and at Talk Wellington our…

Change is a coming in the form of this new Ministry. Will it take on board new ideas? Urban design professionals say we need new ideas and fast – will they be listened to? Our very busy Minister of Housing and Urban Development (and let’s not forget Transport!), Phil Twyford, is getting ready to sit…

“Please give us lots of tax money to fund our transport works” Wellington councils are apparently asking Cabinet today. They will have their fingers crossed that Ministers won’t ask awkward questions like “will this package actually achieve what it should?” because the answer doesn’t seem like it’ll be healthy.

We invest in transport because – overwhelmingly – the calculations say we will get where we’re going faster and time is valuable so it’s worth it. But the ways we’ve assigned a dollar value to it are pretty weird, explains Matt Lowrie of Greater Auckland.

Travel times are at the heart of transport business cases. Business cases are how bureaucrats decide what’s worth spending your money on and what’s not (before politics), and we invest billions of public dollars every year on transport according to business cases. You’d hope they’ve got fundamentally sensible calculations of benefit to the nation… but do they?
Harriet Gale of Greater Auckland points out some big questions regarding how we do our sums.

The government’s Policy Statement on Land Transport is now open for public input. Talk Wellington observes the responses – including some doomsaying, fear and trembling. Should we care, and if so should we all be crying “Hooray!” or “Help!”?